Kayaker Mike Malone hits the trout trifecta on scouting trip using these techniques
Mike Malone of Sulphur tallied up his best day of speckled trout fishing this past weekend while fishing in Vermilion Bay during a scouting trip for the upcoming Lafayette Kayak Club trout fishing tournament. And he wasn’t the only one.
Such a good day of fishing doesn’t always happen when an angler is fishing an area for the very first time, but that’s exactly what Malone and his fishing partner were doing.
“We’d never fished there before, so we wanted to get a good idea of what we would need to do to have a shot at the tournament this coming weekend, so we drove about three hours to the state park there in Vermilion Bay, but we got there too early. It was 5:30 a.m., and the park doesn’t open until 7,” Malone said.
But with a public boat launch nearby, they decided to put in early, which meant a one mile paddle before they got into the fishing grounds.
“Getting on the water early was worth the drive and the paddle. Right at sunup, we got to the breakwaters, which we wanted to fish. We’ve been told that’s where the trout have been, so we made it to the first one and talked to an angler there, but he hadn’t caught anything,” he said.
Malone and his buddy paddled on to the third set of breakwaters and started fishing topwater lures. Despite the early start and promising looking water, they got nothing. So they switched to swimbaits. Again, nothing.
“Then I went to the old faithful — a popping cork and a Vudu shrimp in natural color. I caught my first trout of the day almost immediately, then caught the best one of the day just a few casts later. And after that, it was on for the next few hours,” he said.
Sticking with the cork/artificial shrimp method, Malone caught 20 keeper trout and many more undersized fish. His fishing partner caught 15 keepers, also throwing back numerous fish that were too small to keep.
“I was working the cork with a cadence like two pops, pause, one pop, pause, three pops, pause. If they were going to hit, it was usually on the pause.
“It was like that for everyone around us, and the place was packed. We had about 50 boats and another 20 or so kayaks all crammed in and fishing in this one area,” and Malone said as the day went on and the sun got higher, they all eased slightly further and further from the breakwaters until they were about 300 yards away, and the bite stayed hot. He said it was an outgoing tide, but it was barely noticeable to them as they fished.
“It felt like a slack tide while out on the bay. It was slick calm the whole time, and barely a ripple on the water, but when we paddled back to the landing, you could tell the tide had dropped while we were fishing,” he said.
Malone expects the bite to stay hot for the foreseeable future, especially with cooler temperatures on the way.
